ALGEBRAIC SPECIFICATION OF DOCUMENTS

According to recent research, nearly 95% of a corporate's information is stored in documents. Further studies indicate that companies spend between 6% and 10% of their gross revenues in printing and distributin g documents in several ways: web and cdrom publishing, database storag e and retrieval, and printing. In this context documents exist in diff erent formats, from plain text files to internal database or text proc essor formats. It is clear that document reusability and low-cost main tenance are two important issues in the near future. The majority of a vailable document processors is purpose-oriented, reducing the necessa ry flexibility and reusability of documents. The problem of adapting t he same text to different purposes gives rise to waste of time. For ex ample you may want to have the same document as an article, as a set o f slides, or as a poster; or you can have a dictionary document produc ing a book and a list of words for a spell checker. This conversion co uld be done automatically from the first version of the document if it complies with some standard requirements. The key idea will be to kee p a complete separation between syntax and semantics. In this way, we produce an abstract description separating conceptual issues of docume nt structure from those concerned with document use. This note propose s a few guidelines to build a system to solve the above problem. Such a system should be an algebraic based environment in order to provide facilities for definition of document types; specification of function s over document types; and definition and handling of documents as alg ebraic terms. Our approach (rooted in the tradition of constructive al gebraic specification), allows for a homogeneous environment to deal w ith operations such as merging documents, converting formats, translat ing documents, extracting different kinds of information (to setup inf ormation repositories, data bases, or semantic networks) or portions o f documents (as it happens, for instance, in literate programming), an d some other actions, not so traditional, like mail reply, or memo pro duction. We intend to use CAMILA(a specification language and prototyp ing environment developed at Universidade do Minho, by the Computer Sc ience group) to develop the above-mentioned system. (C) 1998-Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.